Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.)

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30 January 2011

Chris Langdon was raised in Indiana. His father was a newspaper photographer and he started making Super 8 films while still a teenager. He was educated at the California Institute of the Arts from 1971-6, where he produced around forty well-regarded 16mm and 35 mm short films. The films were noted for satirizing tendencies in the Los Angeles art world, and using tropes taken from popular culture to question how we look at images. Chris liked to blur low art and high art, and was also an anti-war activist.

After 1976, he quit film-making, and took up representative painting which was unfashionable at that time. Later work was in graphics, sculpture, lithography, assemblage, photography, and other media.

Chris transitioned as Inga in the late 1990s. She studied traditional Chinese medicine, graduating in 1997, and lived in China for several years.

Film preservationist, Mark Toscano, tracked her down through the internet in 2009, and in January 2010 curated a retrospective of her work.

*Not Chris Langan also born 1952, the bouncer with a high IQ, nor the Australian pop singer,

28 January 2011

Edith Ferguson (or Enid Foreman) was a female impersonator, and perhaps also a lawyer, in southern California, who retired in the early 1950s.

Edith advertised in Billboard and Variety magazine offering ‘personalized instruction’ in female impersonation. For a fee of a few hundred dollars she sent 50 or more mimeographed lectures on how to do makeup, how to wear clothes, how to sound and appear like a woman.

Edith, Muriel (later known as Virginia Prince) and other transvestites started meeting at the Long Beach home of Joan Thornton. In 1952, they started a mimegraphed newsletter which they called Transvestia. The
initial subscription list was built around Louise Lawrence’s
address book, and the subscription list for Edith’s
instruction course. However when Prince restarted Transvestia in 1960, Edith and Joan were no longer involved.

She spoke out against transsexual surgery, but hoped that the Christine Jorgensen publicity might ‘redound to the benefit of transvestites in general’.

Darrell Raynor. A Year Among the Girls. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1966. New York: Lancer Books, 1968: 105-6.

Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 180-1.

24 January 2011

Marie Madeleine was raised as a girl. At the age of sixteen, she developed a moustache and whiskers, and she decided to dress as a man.

The same year, 1815, Lefort was presented at the Paris Faculté de Medicine, and examined by several renowned doctors. A commission was appointed to determine her sex. Two experts, François Chaussier, obstetrician, and Philippe Petit-Radel, surgeon, declared that she was a malformed male, but Pierre Béclard, professor of anatomy, insisted that he was a female but with a hypertrophied clitoris, a strong voice and a beard.

At the age of nineteen, Lefort decided that psychologically he was a man. He then avoided the attentions of authorities and journalists despite seeking medical attention a few times, until 1864 when as a man with a long grey beard he was admitted as a patient to the Hotel Dieu de Paris. He was treated for pleurisy, but died shortly from the disease. An autopsy revealed that he had all the 'essential organs of a woman'

Pierre Béclard. Bulletins de la Faculté, 1815: 273.

C.J.S. Thompson. The Mysteries of Sex: Women Who Posed as Men and Men Who Impersonated Women London: Hutchinson. 1938. New York: Causeway Books. New York: Dorset Press, 1993: 17.

Despite a clear decision by Lefort to live as a man, all the medical accounts refer to him as Marie Madeleine and none give his male name, nor any details of what he did all his life. How did he live? Did he marry? Nothing is said.

22 January 2011

Pat Doyle knew from his abusive father that he was not supposed to wear dresses, so he learned to to hide them. "It was suffocating. Imagine yourself six feet under, in a casket, and knowing that you're alive, but nobody else knows you're alive. They think you're dead."

Pat and Patti, both

He grew up to have three failed marriages, and became a respected sports writer for the Toronto Sun, Toronto Star, Calgary Sun, Winnipeg Sun and Winnipeg Tribune. He covered major sports events, including Super Bowls, Major League Baseball, the Stanley Cup playoffs, world championship boxing, the PGA Tour, professional tennis, and once hosted his own radio talk show in Winnipeg.

At the beginning of the new century, Pat moved to Victoria, BC, and she started transition in 2008, with surgery in 2009. "I'm finally living, The transition was absolute joy. A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing."

She is working at a couple of part-time jobs, and still does some sports writing. She has also written a book about her life.

20 January 2011

Douglas Wakefield, married and a father of two, was arrested and convicted in 1974 for strangling his uncle in Gipton, Leeds, beating him with a hammer and stabbing him 48 times with a garden fork.

Later in HMP Parkhurst he killed another inmate. He twice took prison officers as hostage, and has done more than 1,000 hours in solitary. He also had a second marriage while behind bars.

In the mid-1990s he applied for and was allowed to change sex. After surgery, as Tai, she was transferred to New Hall prison for women.

There she met Thelma Purchase, who is doing a minimum 30 years for suffocating a disabled man who had left her £60,000 in his will. They decided to be joined in a civil partnership. They were able to pay the £345 wedding costs out of money that they had saved in jail.

18 January 2011

Fereydoon Molkara worked in television before transition. In 1978, before the Iranian Revolution, Fereydoon wrote to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was then in exile, requesting religious guidance. Khomeini replied that the case was different from homosexuality, and said that she should follow the Islamic obligations of being a woman.

After the Revolution, Fereydoon, like all other transgender persons in Iran, was seriously harassed. She was made to wear men’s clothing, forced to take male hormones, and confined in a psychiatric hospital.
In 1983, she tried approaching Khomeini directly and was badly beaten up by his bodyguards before succeeding. However Khomeini did give Fereydoon a religious authorization for sex-change surgery. This has been taken to be a fatwa that covers other transgender persons as well.

Subsequently Maryam struggled to organize transgender persons in Iran, and introduce medical standards. However she was not happy with procedures in Iran, and had surgery in Thailand in 2001. She runs the major transsexual campaign group in Iran, and frequently has to bail out trans persons who have been arrested.

16 January 2011

Of Spanish descent, Charriez was born and raised in New York City. She was acting and modeling from age 16. She had a small part as a go-go girl in the 1998 film 54.

In 2006 Claudia made it to the semi-finals of America's Next Top Model hosted by Tyra Banks, but was then disqualified for being transsexual. Tyra Banks then declared Claudia to be "America's Next Top Transgender" on her talk show.

One of the judges, Janice Dickinson, a former model and now running her own agency brought Claudia onto her own television reality show, made her pose as a man, but then fired her in the last episode on the grounds that they could not make any money from her.

14 January 2011

Pankaj Sharma was the son of an English professor and bank employee in Delhi. He often dressed as a girl, and by class 12 had a boyfriend. His parents took him to a sexologist, a psychiatrist and to the temple, but to no avail.

He eloped with his boyfriend before the final exams, and they travelled in east Asia and Europe. After two years he was called home as his mother was dying of kidney failure. His boyfriend called off their relationship, and later married and became a father.

Panjak attempted suicide but was saved by his father. He attended Khalsa college with the intention of becoming a teacher, but his father formally disowned him.

He left for Mumbai with only Rs 8,000, and slept at the railway station for the first fortnight, where he was taken to be a hijra. He found four young women who let him stay, and told him of a gay bar where, with his androgynous looks, he found work.

As Bobby, she applied for work in the film industry, encountering homophobic rejections, experimenting with different surnames until as Bobby Darling she got a small part. She has had laser hair removal and breast implants. She is considering genital surgery: "In India, it will cost me Rs 4 lakh, but in USA the cost will be about Rs 10 lakh. I would prefer the US, as such surgery is done there on a regular basis."

12 January 2011

Norman was born in Sydney, the eleventh and last child of Henry Zions, né Zajac, a Polish-born Jew and his English wife. Norman studied medicine at the University of Sydney, and gained an MB and Ch.M, in 1915. After a short spell at a hospital in Brisbane, he was a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps for the duration of the war.

Haire, Hirschfeld on the left

In 1919 he worked his passage to Europe, and changed his surname to Haire (Polish 'zajac' = hare).

Also in 1920 he attended a meeting of the Malthusian League, and was appointed medical officer-in-charge at the Walworth Women's Welfare Centre, one of the earliest birth-control clinics.

He contacted, corresponded with and frequently met Havelock Ellis. He was a member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, the International Medical Group for the Investigation of Birth Control, and the Eugenics Education Society.

In 1925 he opened a private practice in Harley Street, and was notoriously an expensive consultant. He pioneered the Haire vaginal pessary as a form of birth control, and introduced into Britain the Grafenberg 'silver' ring, an intra-uterine device. He followed the methods of Eugen Steinach in attempting male sexual rejuvenation by bilateral vasectomy.

In 1927 Haire published his major book, Hymen. As secretary of the World League for Sexual Reform, he organized its third congress in London in 1929. He edited the proceedings, a massive 670-page volume, and published them a year later. He was president of the league from 1930. In 1931, the league protested that Norma Hall had been sentenced to 18 months hard labour. In the mid-1930s he acquired a country estate at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.

In 1933 Haire wrote the introduction to the English translation of Lili Elvenes (Elbe)'s biography. In 1934 he edited The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge, mainly written by Arthur Koestler (as Alfrede Costler). In 1936 he published an anthology of Hirschfeld's writings. Until the 1991 translation of Die Transvestiten, this is the Hirschfeld book used by most English sexologists.

The World League for Sexual Reform fell apart that same year, the German chapter having been destroyed by the Nazi government, but Haire continued as the president of the British off-shoot, the Sex Education Society.

Although he did not drink alcohol, Haire was known for his appetite and his joy in food. By the late 1930s he had been diagnosed as diabetic and nephritic. In 1940, shorty after war broke out, he returned to Australia. He pleaded health reasons, but was accused of cowardice.

He opened an expensive practice in Sydney, but also lectured for the Workers' Educational Association and the New Education Fellowship, and spoke on the wireless. He took up acting, and was well reviewed for his performance in Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma. Using the name Wykeham Terris, he wrote a series of articles for the weekly magazine, Woman, a pioneering series discussing sex-education, pregnancy and childbirth issues, gynaecological disorders and venereal disease.

In 1944 he appeared in a debate on the Australian Broadcasting Commission's 'Nation's Forum of the Air' arguing that population should be limited. Afterwards he was strongly denounced in the House of Representatives. He was soon ready to return to London, and did so in 1946, but not before completing his book on Havelock Ellis.

However many of his old associates were dead, and others avoided him. He tried to revive the Sex Education Society, and founded and partly financed the Journal of Sex Education (1948-52).

On a trip to the US he suffered a heart attack, and never completely recovered. He died of ischaemic cardiac failure in 1952.

He had never married, and left his estate, including his library and papers to the University of Sydney which founded the Norman Haire research fellowship.

Norman Haire & Margaret Sanger. Hygienic Methods of Family Limitation. London: Printed for the Malthusian League by Geo. Standring, 1920.

Sexual Reform Congress, and Norman Haire. World League for Sexual Reform, Proceedings of the Third Congress. London: K. Paul, 1930.

Lili Elbe and Niels Hoyer, translated from the German by H.J. Stenningwith an introduction by Norman Haire. Man into woman: An authentic record of a change of sex ; The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danisch painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). New York: Dutton, 1933. London : Jarrold Publisher's, xiii, 287 pp 24 plates 1933.

Magnus Hirschfeld, edited by Norman Haire. Sexual Anomalies And Perversions: Physical And Psychological Development And Treatment - A Summary Of The Works Of The Late Dr Magnus Hirschfeld. Francis Aldor Publisher, 1936. Emerson Books,1948.

10 January 2011

Alex started DJing in 1989 using the name DJ Lowenbandiger at free acid house parties. In 1991 he and others started London's first euro techno night at the Bar Industria. He also opened a record shop, Silverfish, at 146 Charing Cross Road which was open 24 hours a day – the first to do so. The shop became a collective of sculptors, musicians, scientists, film makers, poets and acted as an inspiration to the club scene of the 1990s.

Silverfish staged almost 300 techno electro parties, with Alex as the resident DJ at most of them. Alex Silverfish became a DJ brand name across Europe, but still played for free in underground techno parties.

With the new century, Alex embraced electroclash alongside techno, and also announced that she was changing to female. “After a life of agony, four years of therapy and two suicide attempts, I’ve finally started a sex reassignment program to correct a natural error that occurred at birth. Basically I’ve finally become one after a lifetime of living a double life.”

She received much support from trans persons in the club scene, and from techno friends, but frequently got a lot of hatred from Bengali gangs on the housing estates close to her flat in Bethnal Green. “Giving too much freedom to fascists of every faith always results in weaker groups and sections of society losing theirs and suffering,” she warned.

She committed suicide at age 43.

Her friend, Adele Adams, set up Project Silverfish in 2009, a support service for intersex and transgender persons.

Long forgotten, Bethnal Green was the location for Bethnal Rouge, a drag commune associated with the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s. This was long before the Bengalis came. Bethnal Rouge also met hostility from some neighbours, but at least there were several queens to give each other support.

08 January 2011

Marco Antonio Abram was raised in São Paulo. She knew as a teenager that she was trans, and as Claudia began performing in nightclubs and in experimental theatre and several pornochanchada films. She also appeared as a model in men's magazines. She was regularly arrested as the police frequently raided the gay clubs. In addition, she trained as a hairdresser and makeup artist.

In 1980 she was the lyricist and singer in the punk band, Jardins das Delícias. She became an AIDS activist, and to tackle prejudice against AIDS, she developed the show, O Vomito do Mito, which she regularly staged at the legendary club, Madame Satã, in which she stripped naked in a bath full of fake blood. She and many other artists protested against the then military dictatorship which ended in 1985.

In 1988 she moved to Switzerland and stayed for eleven years, working both in clubs and as a makeup artist.

On return to São Paulo she put out two major CDs: Melopéia and Sonetos do poeta Glauco Mattoso. She also recorded electronic music and FunkyDisco. She was honoured by leading the São Paulo gay pride parade, and at the Festival Mix Brasil de Cinema e Vídeo da Diversidade Sexual. She co-ordinated Flor do Asfalto, a study group of gender identity, and wrote for G Magazine.
In 2008 she published Olhares de Claudia Wonder – Crônicas e Outras Histórias. In 2009 the documentary of her life, Meu Amigo Claudia, was made by Dácio Pinheiro, and premiered at the Frameline Lesbian and Gay Festival in San Francisco.

06 January 2011

In 2003, a plane carrying 3 US military contractors crashed in Caquetá, Columbia, and the three contractors were taken prisoner by FARC.

The Colombian government sent 147 soldiers, the troops of Vulture and Destroyer companies to find the contractors. That they never did. But while digging because of a diarrhoea outbreak, they found a FARC money deposit, millions of dollars (USD) and pesos (COP). Each soldier took a fortune.

Among them were three brothers, of whom the youngest was Lenin. Lenin was more or less known to the other soldiers for being gay. He knew what he would do with his share. He went abroad for an operation and returned as Jenny. She now runs a beauty shop.

The other soldiers spent too much, and attracted attention. The Government arrested many of them for theft. Some others were perhaps killed by FARC hitmen. But Jenny was not noticed, and she was left alone.

John Otis. Law of the Jungle : the Hunt for Colombian Guerrillas, American Hostages, and Buried Treasure. New York: William Morrow, 2010.

04 January 2011

Steve New was raised in north-west London. One of his first jobs was as office boy at Warner Records. At 14 he played with the London Jazz Orchestra.

At 15 he answered an advert in Melody Maker that turned out to be for a second guitarist for the Sex Pistols, but he was rejected when he would not cut his hair. However Glen Matlock, newly fired from the Sex Pistols, invited Steve to join his new band the Rich Kids.

He settled in the US after marrying Wendy, the girlfriend of Clash manager Bernie Rhodes. They had a daughter. He fell into addiction, but was rescued and flown home by Chrissie Hynde in the late 1990s. Back in the UK he recorded The New, 2001.

Steve came out as trans, and became Stella Nova. "I've been a tranny from day one".

In 2004 Stella and Beatrice Brown founded Beastallabeast and produced three albums of feisty thrash electro-blues. Also in 2004 he married again, and they had two children.

Diagnosed with cancer, Stella played with a re-formed Rich Kids in January 2010 as a benefit for her family. Stella died in May at age 50.

02 January 2011

Suzie started dressing as a boy when still a child. She did theatrical make-up with friends, and even then was mainly making girls look like guys. Growing up, she hardly menstruated at all.

In the late 1970s/early 1980s Suzie Science was the lead singer in the band Science, which played the New York club, Max's Kansas City, Women's One World (WOW),and elsewhere. She was art director at Max’s, and as an advocate of lesbian S&M made occasional performance with leather implements.

As a man he used different names: John Grant, Johnny Armstrong, John Austen. By the mid 1980s Johnny was being taken as a man, and was doing live S&M shows with his girlfriend at Belle de Jour, a professional dungeon located in a loft in Chelsea. In 1986 he made serious enquiries about hormonal and surgical transition, and began taking testosterone.

He then founded his F2M Fraternity for both cross-dressers and decided transsexuals. He also invited curious doctors and writers. There was no other such group in New York at that time, Mario Martino's group of the late 1960s being long forgotten. A Gender Identity project was founded in 1989 at the New York Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Community Center, but it was primarily for MTF clients. The new group met at Kit Rachlin's apartment, and Johnny picked up most of the expense for advertising. He went on the Howard Stern radio show even though he knew that he would be presented as a freak, but it would get the word out.

Annie Sprinkle had met Johnny at an S&M show at Plato's retreat, and although not herself in transition, she loved the people, and started an affair with Les Nichols whom she met at the group. Johnny shot and co-directed and wrote the music for the film about them.

Johnny evolved from a butch dyke into a gay man. He moved from the lesbian S&M scene into a male sub/dom netherworld. He once went home with a man he met in a bar who tied him to a bed for days on end with a gun pointed at his head. The man finally ejaculated when Johnny gave him permission to shoot.

Dianne Torr met both Annie and Johnny when Johnny made her up for before and after photographs. Dianne credits Johnny with giving her the extra push that she needed to develop a male persona that could pass in public, by teaching her the necessary make-up. He claimed that he had coined the term 'drag king', and in 1990 he started the Drag King workshops, where he did the make-up on the participants and also gave lectures on phalloplasty. Dianne joined him to give instruction on body positions, gestures and attitudes. They also performed together at the 10th anniversary of WOW later that year. His demi-monde adventures made him unreliable, and Dianne had to take over doing the make-up as well.

In 1992 Johnny and several drag kings were on the Joan Rivers Show, and he organized two Drag King Balls that same year, with the first formally judged drag king contest (although the voguing ball houses had been doing much the same for some time and the film Paris is Burning had come out in 1990).

However his increasing desire was to pass as a gay man, and not be known as transsexual. But in 1998 he hosted a low-budget cable television show where he stated that he was not a drag king, but a regular guy. After that he returned to his private life.

Leigh Crow (Elvis Herselvis) also coined the term Drag King in San Francisco around 1990. She was impersonating ‘the king’ and doing an inversion of what a drag queen does. There is no reason to assume that either Science or Crow borrowed the term from the other. Like the word transgender, drag king was an obvious term that would be coined sooner or later, and it is no surprise that two persons coined it independently.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.